Missive from the Congo 001

Originally posted 24 Oct 2006 19:58:38 +0000 (GMT)

Hello all. This is my first missive from the Congo. It has been a whirlwind of change for the first six days. I left Ottawa last Wednesday and after nearly 20 hours of traveling, arrived in Kinshasa (The capital). The airport was something else. Everybody wants to help with your luggage. They won't take no for an answer and obviously want to be paid for their "help", even if all they did was place their hand on the pile of luggage while you pushed the cart. Fortunately we had a local UN employee to bark at them and help maintain some semblance of order.

The drive in from the airport is something else. Imagine a farmers market/flea market but without tables, on a dirt road… for 15 kilometers. Everybody is trying to sell something, a lot of it junk. There is no public transportation system so people use a sort of communal taxi, such as they use in Mexico. Except that here the vehicles are battered rust buckets, usually with no windows and with people hanging out the sides and back. The driving is manic. It makes the Metropolitan at rush hour in Montreal seem like an orderly and sedate Sunday drive. They pass on the left and right. There are tons of bikes that weave in and out of traffic and there are no traffic signals.

After one day in Kinshasa I move on to Kisangani which is a provincial capital I will be staying at for the remainder of the tour. Kisangani is much less hectic though the drivers are just as bad and the roads are much worse. There are potholes everywhere on the main roads. The secondary roads don’t have potholes because they are not paved. They have ruts and mud holes. They make the road to my parent’s cottage look like a four lane highway. More on that in another missive.

The last three days have been devoted to the handover. I have been so inundated with information I feel like my head will explode. I liken it to drinking from a fire hose. The staff is multinational. There are only two people from the same country. The other 25 or so persons are all from different countries. One of the most difficult things so far has been to try and get use to the multitude of accents and remember who to speak French to, and who to speak English to.


Anyways, it is getting late for I will sign off for now. Talk to you next week.
John